We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed during training.
We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e. g.
arXiv:2606. 26327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In actor-critic reinforcement learning, network architectures are typically manually designed.
arXiv:2604. 01499v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space.
arXiv:2606. 03108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static.
The paper investigates continual reinforcement learning using neuroevolution, comparing evolution strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GAs) across diverse environments and network sizes. ES consistently achieves a better balance between stability and plasticity, while GAs are more plastic but forget more. The authors attribute this to ES finding wider neighborhoods in weight space, with overlap between consecutive tasks correlating with the stability-plasticity trade‑off, and note that common RL plasticity issues do not transfer to neuroevolution.
arXiv:2606. 18388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics.
arXiv:2506. 01568v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima.
arXiv:2608. 15700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Distillation of training targets generated thru search/planning has proven useful in reinforcement learning, but search can take exceedingly long.
arXiv:2606. 20858v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The temporal structure of reward composition in reinforcement learning (RL) is typically hand-designed and held fixed throughout training, leaving the progression of motivational priorities largely unexplored.
arXiv:2507.11482v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial learning systems are graduating from passive learners to increasingly autonomous agents, lending pragmatic urgency to the question of wh...
The paper introduces Agent Evolving Learning (AEL), a two‑timescale framework that dynamically evolves an LLM agent’s memory‑retrieval harness in open‑ended environments. A fast Thompson‑Sampling bandit selects among retrieval policies each episode, while a slower LLM reflection diagnoses performance drops and injects new policies when the current set plateaus. AEL outperforms ten self‑improving and non‑LLM baselines on a sequential portfolio benchmark, boosting Sharpe ratio by 27% and achieving significant accuracy gains on a support‑ticket routing stream.
arXiv:2608.21946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with outcome-based objectives such as GRPO enables LLM-based agents to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, yet the reusable exp...